Unrest was not the only server affected. It turns out that the server maintenance that occurred this week for Butcherblock, Everfrost, Freeport, Nagafen, and Unrest removed all scheduled activations and deactivations.

The affected servers have had the following events rescheduled:
Erollisi Day now concludes on 2/20/15 at 11:59pm Pac.
Moonlight Enchantments began on 2/20/15 at 9:45am and will last through 2/22/15 at 11:59pm Pac.

EQ2 Player TrulyVexed has been working on a fantastic EQ2 fansite with information for players of all skill levels wanting to succeed in the Altar of Malice expansion. The new EQ2Stuff.com site includes a variety of guides, from Altar of Malice Heroic Zone strategies, to Altar of Malice gear and adornment selections, to lists of which shinies drop in which AoM instances, to useful (but not required!) ACT triggers, there is a lot of valuable information all in this one website. TrulyVexedannounced the site on the EQ2 Forums a few weeks ago and we’ve been meaning to feature the site but some other news got in the way!

Originally launched at www.mad-as-toast.co.uk, the site is now available at EQ2Stuff.com!

Flowers are blooming and love is in the air once again. Erollisi Day might have originated with the Sentries of Erollisi, faithful devotees to The Goddess of Love, but it’s blossomed into a holiday that’s celebrated by Norrathians across the lands! Whether you are a hopeless romantic or a love cynic, this holiday has events you’re sure to enjoy. Take a look at all of the exciting events taking place this Erollisi Day!

Have you taken the EverQuest II: Altar of Malice expansion survey? If not, head here:

Personally as someone who has dedicated some time to writing good survey questions, this has to be one of the most generic surveys I’ve seen. On one hand, there is an entire page dedicated to the six raid zones in the expansion, yet the entirety of the tradeskill and heroic content are each distilled down to a single 1-10 rating question. What if you love the zones, animations, populations, humor, and the music, but you dislike difficulty, how would you rate that?

It’s pretty clear that Marketing largely referenced the expansion’s press release without much (if any) consultation with the EQ2 team. I wonder what if anything SOE will learn from this survey. I feel that the way the questions are written is prone to lead to invalid conclusions.

Here are your update notes this week. Of course the biggest change is Dungeon Maker being nerfed into oblivion. Also don’t forget that there will be a 3 hours of e-commerce and voice chat maintenance today coinciding with the patch.

Each year, Frostfell gets even bigger with more quests, more collections, and more recipes with more items you can make for your home. It’s hard not to miss something without a writeup or two and fortunately EQ2 ZAM and EQ2Traders continue to deliver. Meanwhile Lera has fully updated EQ2Furniture to include multiple screenshots of every single house item available in EQ2, including all the new goodies for Frostfell! As of Noon pacific, Frostfell is open for business, and the remaining few EQ2 fan sites are all over this much-anticipated event.

The weather outside might be frightful, but the Norrathian streets are decorated and the citizens are so delightful! The Gigglegibber goblins and Frostfell elves are spreading cheer throughout Norrath this season and encouraging players to visit the Frostfell Wonderland Village. You can access the Wonderland through the Magic Closets in Qeynos Province District, Freeport, Haven, Kelethin, Neriak, Gorowyn and New Halas. In addition to the return of your favorite Frostell festivities, you can also look forward to plenty of exciting new content this season!

Fixed an issue where you could lose your grandmaster spell if you betrayed.

The tooltip and examine window information will now correctly display the damage type of missile weapons.

Rejoice! Exiles can now use the shared bank!

Exiles can now change suffix titles!

SOE Live Request: Added the command /dump_items_to_log, which, true to its name, will write the contents of your inventory to your log. Please note that only items known to your game client will be logged; as such, the output may vary depending on whether you’re in a house zone or not.

SOE Live Request: Players may now drag game commands such as “Summon Mount,” “Melee Attack,” “Ranged Attack” etc. into the Edit Macro window to create a step with the appropriate command.

Implemented support for mouseover macros. By specifying %v (similar to the usage of %t) as the target in a macro, the player name under the mouse cursor will be used as the target of the spell cast. This only applies to the following UI elements:

Your own character info window (found in the upper left corner with the default UI)

In order to institute Quality of Life tweaks and changes to Itemization, Class Balance, and overall gameplay, the EQ2 team launched Focused Feedback threads a few weeks back on a number of topics. We still have time to post our comments in these threads:

Last year, Frostfell only received a short window of testing, so we’re happy to report that this highly-anticipated annual event has appeared early on the Test servers. Live Event maestro and Senior Designer Nathan “Kaitheel“ has this report:

Frostfell is now active on Test!

There’s plenty of Frostfell cheer throughout Norrath this season! Gigglegibbers and Frostfell elves are busy celebrating the holiday within the player cities, and encouraging everyone to visit the Frostfell Wonderland Village, accessed through the Magic Closets in Qeynos Province District, Freeport, Haven, Kelethin, Neriak, Gorowyn and New Halas. There you can assist Frestishan, Candice Cheriweth, Gardy Ex-Giftgiver, Mr. McScroogle, Queen Bunny, and Snarf Frostfoot with some holiday tasks, but only after you release them from their deep freeze! For those that have a talent for crafting, you can help Sogs Frostfoot, or gather presents to craft wondrous new Frostfell goodies for yourself. Don’t forget to log in each day and claim your extra-special Frostfell present from everyone’s favorite Frostfell Gigglegibber, Santa Glug!

It’s the time of year when a chill sets in and darkness falls on the lands. Ghouls begin to emerge from the shadows and both tricks and treats are plentiful. Whether you enjoy crafting holiday items or are looking for a spooky adventure, there’s something for all Norrathians to celebrate as Nights of the Dead returns to Norrath!

There are several new features for Nights of the Dead 2014, including a new Candy Crusher achievement! Adventurers can also seek out Setri Lur’eth in Nektulos Forest to take part in a new annual quest, “A Dream, By Any Other Name.” Don’t miss out on the new things holiday merchants have to sell, including house items, dungeon spawners, petamorph wands, and appearance weapons. New Bounding Orc Skeleton and Shadowy Lich costumes are also available for those who want to adventure in style!

PERFORMANCE UPDATES
We don’t want to get into too much detail, but overall we updated some very old libraries to bring EQII up to date. We also updated memory management, fixed some memory leaks as a result, and made some other code changes that look to be improving server performance.

Here’re a few notes to give you a bit more detail:

Improved client performance on maximum settings. Additionally, altered the “Extreme Quality” defaults to look and run better on higher end machines. This means that non-raiders who do quests, decorate houses, heroic dungeons (without oceans of proc gear), are going to notice considerable improvement.

We have made several improvements to spawning of items and NPCs to make this less of a load on the server.

We have made some optimizations to how data is sent from the server to the client.

Optimized some server side AA calculations.

Several Marketplace improvements on performance and improved how the welcome window is sent to clients.

EQ2Wire will be liveblogging EQ2 Insider Episode #4, which as it turns out will be Maggie “Luperza” Krohn‘s last episode as she has taken a position at Curse.com. You can watch EverQuest II Insider #4 at Twitch right now.

This was a live blog of today’s EQ2 Insider Episode #4.

Talking about SOE Live and how positive and fun it was.

Talking about updates later this year.

Kander encouraging people to play Altar of Malice beta as players will earn very nice rewards on Live for their efforts on Beta.

As long last we’ve resumed posting videos recorded from SOE Live 2014. After this, we’ve still got the EQ2 Art & Animation panel, as well as three player panels and the Player Studio panel. Oy vey!

This was the last panel at SOE Live 2014 for EverQuest II — Questions & Answers #2. Due to room acoustics, this recording took an inordinate amount of time to edit and normalize. Fortunately, Audio quality improves around the 3 minute mark when questions begin.

Because sleep is overrated, EQ2 fan Afista spent the weekend meticulously transcribing the two EverQuest II Q&A panels and has posted them on EQ2 ZAM. Also don’t miss the notes from the all-important Mechanics panel posted by Cyliena as linked below. I got a kick out of hanging out with both of them at SOE Live and seeing what they’re doing for the EQ2 community. I’m starting to feel like a bit of a slacker now…

At SOE Live 2014, the community had questions and the devs had answers! ZAM was there to keep track of what everyone wanted to know. Afista has written a full recap of what happened during the Q&A following the EQ2 keynote, as well as the AMAA Sessions Part 1 & Part 2.

In the EverQuest II: Systems panel, the EverQuest II team talks about the upcoming expansion, specifically class balance, mechanics, some new features, and takes player questions. On the panel: Akil “Lyndro” Hooper, Kyle “Kander” Vallee, Michael “Xelgad” Ganz, Robert “Caith” Fouts, Dave “Maevianiu” Kish, Douglas “Endymion” VanDerveer, and Justin “Jamiss” Michael. We recorded this at SOE Live 2014 in Las Vegas and are happy to be able to share it.